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I think I just completed a perfect shawl for transitioning into winter, and though this one is for my sister, I might want to make one for myself. 😉 I even want to use the same color, because it’s so bright and cheerful and gorgeous!

Since this is a rectangular shawl, I designed it to have alternating horizontal sections of two textured stitches, with each section pair separated by a couple of eyelet rows. The textured stitches I used are moss stitch and diamond honeycomb stitch. The sections are of varying height, although symmetrical between the top and bottom halves.

I’d originally thought of having same-height sections for a given textured stitch, but while knitting, realized that there was a high probability that I’d run out of yarn. So I played with the section heights in my design until I was sure I’d use up most of the yarn but not run out of it. I barely have half a meter of yarn left now – so that’s another point to this project! 😉

Another constraining factor for this design was that my sister wanted this shawl to completely cover her arms, but she also doesn’t like narrow shawls much, which meant it had to be at least medium sized. There definitely wasn’t enough yarn for that, and since this yarn is at least a year old, I couldn’t order more. How about adding yarn of a different color? We couldn’t think of any other color that would work well with this one.

So I decided to use a super-stretchy cast on and bind off – Jeny’s Stretchy Slipknot Cast-On and her Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not, because the yarn itself turned out to be slightly heavy, and now the shawl totally stretches lengthwise when it’s worn. 🙂 Hence, I thought blocking it would probably be useless. My sister is anyway happy because it does completely cover her arms and is of a satisfactory height, so we thought she could wear the shawl unblocked for a while, and I can think about further finishing if it comes to it.

Now, after this high, I’m weirdly not in the mood to work on anything yarn related, so I’m left without a yarn project again. No matter, the September section of the Linen and Threads SAL is out, so I’ll take a tiny break and pick it up.

And I think it’s awesome how the simple Old Shale pattern makes for this wavy, beautiful look. I’ve always liked this pattern (though I used to call it Feather and Fan pattern, like a lot of people do) and now, I like it more. 🙂 I’d wanted to incorporate Old Shale into a different project before I started working on this one. I still want to use it in the other project, maybe I’ll think of a different way.

Back to this project, though. When I think raglan, I always think top-to-bottom construction, but in this bottom-to-top project, it was easier to fix the holes that invariably form at the armhole — the ones at the joins / splits of body and sleeves. The fixer stitches always look weird to me in top-to-bottom sweaters, and they were much better here. Or maybe it’s because it’s black. 😉 I should try a bottom-to-top project with a lighter color to see if this experience repeats.

Overall, the general fit, the edgings, and the buttonholes all turned out fine, but as with all my projects, there’s always that something that doesn’t exactly match the expectations of the intended recipient. 🙂 In this case, it’s the neck, which turned out larger than what my sister was hoping for.

If she didn’t want the sweater, I’d be too happy to snatch it away from her (though it won’t fit me exactly the same.) But turns out she does want it! 😐

My Fair Cardi is now deemed to be a morning / midday project, since the black color of the yarn is not very work-friendly in the ambient light of evenings. As a result, its progress has slowed down. Looks like my sister has a bit of a wait ahead for her cardigan. Either that or I’ll have to use up a few vacation days. 🙂

My evening project is now a cardigan that I’m making from yarn that I originally bought to make a top. Could yarn shortage be a problem? Nah! I’m using a large gauge, since I’d like the sweater to be airy without incorporating lace or eyelets.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I wanted a column of some pattern for the back of this cardigan. Bamboo eyelet was one of the earliest eyelet patterns I looked up, and I used that here. I modified the position of the eyelets to make them move around a bit. So essentially, though it doesn’t look like bamboo anymore, I’m still calling it bamboo eyelet cardigan.

I’m mostly done knitting the back, and consequently, with the bamboo eyelet pattern too. The front and sleeves are plain stockinette, and since I consider that boring, I hope I finish the pieces soon. 🙂

Like this:

My next project is a sweater for my sis. We’d talked about what she’s looking for in it, and she’d said she wanted some eyelets in its bottom half, and a solid top half with some pattern. So naturally, I thought about the Feather and Fan pattern, since my fellow knitting/crochet blogger, Kat, had just talked about her Sage Remedy Top, and I thought the pattern there resembled it.

So I looked up the pattern to refresh my memory, and I found that what I’d always thought of as Feather and Fan pattern is actually the Old Shale pattern! Feather and Fan turns out to be a completely different pattern, and Sarah points out the differences in a recent post.

Sarah’s post also mentions projects that use Old Shale pattern, and I came upon My Fair Cardi. It’s a pretty simple design, and I’d thought of exactly that for the bottom half, so I showed it to my sis. She thought the cardigan looked good as is, with Old Shale in both halves. Even the shape of the neck was to her liking. Alright then, problem solved! I could just use this pattern.

The cardigan is a bottom-up raglan construction, and is knit in pieces — sleeves, front, and back — all the way, and the pieces are joined raglan-style in the very end. Um, when I’m knitting a bottom-up raglan cardigan, I like to knit the body as one piece, knit the sleeves, and join all the pieces at the armhole and knit them together. So that’s a slight deviation from the pattern for me — other than the usual deviations to account for changes in measurements to conform to my (or in this case, my sister’s) preferences.

So I knitted a swatch, and readied my excel worksheet to track my pattern deviations, and started on the project. Since Old Shale is mostly stockinette stitches, it’s knitting up fast, compared to my previous chock-full-of-tiny-cables project. Exciting times! 😉

I’m knitting the sleeve flat, a departure from my previous raglan projects. I think I’m beginning to like the distinct seam it results in when the edges are joined, instead of the faux ‘purl column’ seam that I add when knitting sleeves in the round. (And there’s a picot edge! I like that edge.)

This month is definitely colder than last month. There’s a chill in the air that’s not really noticeable when standing in the sun, but slowly seeps into your soul if you’re in the shade. The kind of cold weather that’s too hot for a sweater but perfect for a shawl! 🙂

I knit this shawl for my sis — it looks like she prefers the rectangular ones. Lots of eyelets in this shawl, and I broke them up into repeating thick and thin sections between blocks of uniformly wide stockinette sections. So it’s not too warm and not too airy — it’s just right. (I’m so reminded of Goldilocks when I think that! 🙂 )

The eyelets form a winding texture between them that I just love!

Over some serial episodes, I added quite a few tassels and formed fringes at both ends. I’d love to see them fully frayed over time — and it looks like they’re as eager as I am to get there!

Like this:

I knit a quick slouchy hat last week, while a bad case of cold and cough got me bored out of my mind. Binge-watching serials didn’t help much, and I thought I could knit while watching. But then, I didn’t have the energy to tackle the larger projects that I’ve been working on, and decided to knit something small, just a few rows now and then. A hat would be perfect.

So I picked up this skein I had lying around since the vanilla and liquorice cardigan days. It’s a self-striping yarn anyway, and I wouldn’t have to do too much thinking. But I can’t really go without thinking either, so as a compromise, I added a bit of variety by changing the needle sizes every few rows — I used 4.5mm and 6.5mm ones, with appropriate increases and decreases in stitch count. I also added strategic eyelet rows. The needle size changes aren’t evident much in the end, but whatever… 🙂

Like this:

It’s Lemony because of the beautiful bright-yellow color of the yarn. I started this project because I wanted something different to do while I was trying to finish other projects. 😀 Some of those other projects are still not done, but this wrap finished up pretty quickly.

I first started with the top-down approach without any pattern in mind, working short rows coupled with increases until I reached a decent height, and bound off, only to realize that the yarn is pretty heavy, and it stretched the shawl so much that it looked like I was wearing a python. So I frogged it and started afresh, this time quite narrower.

I still wanted to stick to the top-down construction, and started off with a simple lace pattern at the top. This time, I thought of looking for some inspiration for a lacy bottom edging that I could play with. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not great at designing with eyelets and laces, and I thought I could practice a bit now. I came across the Annis shawl pattern by Susanna IC on Ravelry. The instructions were for a bottom-up shawl, though, so I thought this is my chance to try to convert it to a top-down one and see if it looks the same. I tried and tried with quite a few combinations of yo, k2tog and ssk, but it never really looked the same. Sigh! I’d had enough of searching and experimenting, and just picked the best-looking one from amongst my tries — I had already made much of the shawl and didn’t want to frog it all over again to restart it bottom-up.

Though it doesn’t look anything like the Annis shawl 😀 I’m still happy because (a) it doesn’t look half-bad, and (b) I learned quite a lot about eyelets from those experiments. It’s at least got me interested in experimenting with more lacy patterns to understand them better. There’s also more to pointy ends than I have read about — they didn’t come up right even after blocking, and have receded back into the body now…

Meanwhile…

My friend KG has asked me to knit a sweater for her. I’ve not worked on a large project for someone who’s not immediate family, but thought I could see how it goes. I haven’t blogged about the sweater’s progress, though, and KG checked with me last week about it. She’s given me a deadline, you see… 😉 😀 Now that most of the difficult initial work — thinking of a pattern, swatching, designing parts from reference measurements — is done, the actual knitting is coming along… slowly. I don’t do things for long periods these days because my eyes feel the strain and fatigue at times — my day job also involves staring at a computer screen most of the time.

I like the color of KG’s choice of yarn. (Lavender? Lilac? I’ll just call it some kind of blue.) There’s also one ball of white yarn for some stranded colorwork. And hello, the background polka dots in the picture are also blue-on-white… Coincidence? 🙂

I don’t want to post too many photos of this sweater and spoil the surprise (or shock?) for KG, though, so I still won’t be blogging much about it until she’s seen it. Take note, KG! 😛